View all Articles
Commentary By Ben Boychuk

How Should History Be Taught In High School?

Education Pre K-12

The College Board released a “curriculum framework” to guide the teaching of Advanced Placement high school history classes. The Republican National Committee said the document “emphasizes negative aspects of our nation's history.” Defenders said history is now taught in a more “unsettling, provocative and compelling” fashion. How should history be taught to high schoolers?

Teach good and bad

Well now, the shoe is on the other foot.

For years now, liberals have been complaining that conservative partisans on the Texas Board of Education — which buys 48 million textbooks a year — have de facto control over the national history curriculum: Other states buy textbooks geared to Texas tastes, and there's nothing Texans seem to like more than a little bit of puffed-up myth-making.

The result: Texas officials essentially mandated that history textbooks become a primer on the modern conservative movement, with instructions that “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association” be part of every youngster's education.

History — according to Texas rules — would be little more than an exercise in indoctrination. That's not the proper role of history, but that's how it's often used by conservatives.

Now conservatives have the gall to suggest it's liberals who have politicized history. Why? Because the history taught in the new standards isn't a whitewash.

We Americans believe we're good. More than that, though, we want to be told, over and over again, how good we are — to have our goodness as a country affirmed, constantly, and it is all too often the case that anybody who pauses to contemplate the darker side of our country's past will stand accused of “hating” America or siding with the country's enemies.

It's a paper-thin patriot who can only live the country if it has no warts. And it's a paper-thin academic who only finds history worth teaching if it makes him or her feel good, all the time, about the country.

The new AP standards are probably not perfect, but they appear to represent an honest and honorable attempt to help students deal critically and thoughtfully both with the best moments of our country's past as well as our lesser moments. There's nothing to be afraid of in that. Too bad conservatives are so scared.

— Joel Mathis

Don't emphasize defects

Let's not kid ourselves. Liberals and leftists have been politicizing American history since at least the 1960s. Radical and social historians are in the mainstream of university history departments today. Who do you think writes the textbooks? Who wrote the AP history frameworks?

Hint: Not right-wingers.

This isn't about conservative “fear.” It's about truth. To hear the framework's designers tell it, they only want to present American history “in context” and free from sentimentality and cant. But the frameworks themselves tell a different story. “The idea of America as a nation founded on the pursuit of freedom and equality is presented mainly as a myth ever in need of more repudiation,” writes Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Schools.

Perhaps the new AP history frameworks should be called the Howard Zinn history frameworks. Zinn, a hard-left Boston University historian who died in 2010, wrote “A People's History of the United States.” The book, which is enormously popular with more than 2 million copies in print, peddles what one wag properly described as “a victims'-eye panorama of the American experience.”

Zinn's United States is a nation built on uninterrupted exploitation, greed and racism. His history is a blinkered history. So, too, is the College Board's.

The frameworks' defenders assert that America's founding does not get short shrift, contrary to critics' claims. “The Declaration of Independence stands front and center alongside the Constitution in the section devoted to ‘experiments with democratic ideas and republican forms of government,' including those of France, Haiti and Latin America,” wrote James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, in the New York Times.

But Grossman misses the point. All republics are not created equal. The French, Haiti, and Latin American “experiments” were all failures. The United States is not just another nation among many.

A proper study of history is one of the key foundations of American citizenship. Did America's founding have defects? Of course. But when it comes to studying our history “warts and all,” the new historians seem only to be interested in the warts.

— Ben Boychuk

This piece originally appeared in Los Angeles Daily News

This piece originally appeared in Los Angeles Daily News